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Nobody likes being stressed out, but did you know that stress can actually impact your health?

It’s easy to see why this might be; stress activates the fight-or-flight system in your brain, which dumps stress hormones into your body. These hormones don’t just work on your body, though; they overwhelm the brain’s pre-frontal cortex, which is the part of our brains that make rational choices. Moreover, negative emotions actually activate the brain’s reward center. The result is that it’s easy to become increasingly overwhelmed with stress and it becomes harder and harder to find the calmness that you need to not only feel better, but make good decisions about your life.

I’ve been a family doctor for over 20 years and while I am not an expert in neuroscience, I’m intrigued with human behavior and what motivates behavioral changes that ultimately improve a person’s self care and overall well-being. The findings of the neuroscience of happiness are fascinating and may help build our emotional resilience. I’ve seen people overcome terrible diagnoses with a positive attitude while other patients who focused on the negativity of their situation didn’t fare as well. It wasn’t just a matter of emotional well-being, but a positive or negative attitude seemed to actually be impacting their health and overall happiness.

A good example is a diabetic patient of mine. She was experiencing a great deal of stress in her work and home life, and that stress was overwhelming her. She rarely came in, her diabetes was out of control and she felt like she just couldn’t keep up with things. We sat down together and had a few heart-to-heart talks over a couple of visits about how she could better manage her stress by prioritizing her personal values and self-care. She made a complete life transition last year. She utilized the Healthy Living program at Kaiser Permanente, which is a plant-based diet program. She started changing her diet to a whole-foods diet, she started meditating, and she started walking every day as a priority. Within six months, her test results showed that she was within ideal diabetes control and her body mass index went from over 30 to 25. She had more energy at work, she was sleeping better, and she was smiling when she came in for her visits.

Dr. Suzanne Deschamps is a primary care physician with Kaiser Permanente in West Salem.(Photo: Courtesy of Kaiser Permanente)

The best thing about this is there was no medication involved. She did this by making choices and sustainable behavioral changes that impacted her life and that will prevent complications of diabetes long term. Once she was able to make a decision that allowed her to manage her stress, she was able to make changes that made her not just happier, but healthier.

So knowing how stress and negative emotions can affect our well-being, both emotionally and physically, what steps can we take to overcome the stress reactions of our brains? In tomorrow’s article, I’ll talk about what science says about how we can calm our stressed-out brains and find both happiness and wellness.

Dr. Suzanne Deschamps is a primary care physician with Kaiser Permanente in West Salem.